Unity Saskatchewan, a prairie town about midway between Banff and Saskatoon, could be any isolated farming town anywhere, and in 1918 the isolation and insularity is extreme. A railway line, a telephone/ telegraph line and rudimentary roads are all that connect the community to an outside world dominated by the war in Europe.

In Canadian playwright Kevin Kerr’s evocation (somewhat redolent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in its folksy tone and the use of a narrator character), the town united against a common and distant foe while basking in the heroic glow of its ‘fallen’, soon shows its mean-spirited flipside when the Spanish Flu invades their territory. The less-than-perfect carcass of what we like to call humanity is thus laid out for our identification in darkly comic relief.

Recent pandemic scares (SARS, Bird Flu, etc), other threats to security and the politics of fear at large all resonate as timeless and universal elements in this distillation. And as part of the Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School graduation season Unity (1918) is also an excellent choice because its twelve characters are distributed reasonably evenly between nine actors, of whom six are female (gender-balance always being an issue with drama school productions).

While Maria Walker has the largest role as Beatrice – whose diary entries provide the narrative glue – she only occasionally becomes part of the action. She knits socks and corresponds with a soldier named Glen while showing compassion to a blind returned soldier, Hart, whose estranged mortician father has died just before the play starts. A sense she is somewhat ostracised by the other women gives strength to her role as observer/ recorder and seeker of love. Walker finds and shares Bea’s inner strength to great effect.

Bea’s sister Sissy could not be more different, morbidly preoccupied as she is with the impending end of the world as prophesied in the bible (on November 28 1918) while flirting aggressively with the farmhand Michael. Her richly dramatic means of expressing her feelings are energetically realised by Esther Green.  

Melanie Firbank clearly delineates the journey of Mary, from love-struck misser of her Richard at the front, through doggerel poetess at his memorial grave, to anti-contact watchdog when the Flu puts a dampener on peace celebrations. At times, however, her accent sounds more Irish than Canadian – which draws attention to how spot-on most of the other accents are.

The two telephonists, Rose and Doris, with their fingers on the very pulse of Unity and their ear to its heartbeat, are deliciously comic in the hands of Kirsty Peters and Krystal Neho respectively. Their placing, in Rose Kirkup’s otherwise expansive set design, is strangely limited and must be frustrating for some who almost always just see their backs.

As earthbound as Sissy is flighty, the late mortician’s Icelandic niece Sunna, now running the burial business single-handed, is beautifully nailed with deadpan minimalism by Julia Croft. Likewise the stolid pragmatism of farmer Stan, whose wife dies in childbirth as the play opens, is powerfully rendered by Paul Harrop, who also plays another farmer, Ted.

James Winter scores a good trifecta with "Preacher-Boy" Michael, returned soldier Glen and gruff farmer Fred. Especially compelling is Asher Smith as the blinded solder Hart. It’s a gift of a role which he accepts with alacrity.

Director Conrad Newport keeps the action flowing and focussed in Kirkup’s set, which uses timber frames to isolate spaces and people, and gives a sense of wide open expanse. A gravel pathway is used to great effect when it comes to the crunch. Manda Smith’s excellent sound design is punctuated with a recurring motif that I take to be the winnowing machine, separating the wheat from the chaff – speaking of which, there is a rich harvest to be got from this bunch of graduates.

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